Under the Light

by Laura Whitcomb

  I could see the tension of his own story behind his eyes, but he didn’t share it. “Sorta like there’s safety glass between us and everything else,” he said. To test the rules, he reached out and took my hand. I jumped but didn’t pull away. The warmth of his fingers fascinated me. But I wasn’t sure if I was feeling his hand or the energy of his hand. Or the heat of his thinking of my hand in his.

  He let go. “No wall between us, though.”

  My blush throbbed hot like a bad sunburn even though I technically had no skin. “I didn’t say you could touch me.”

  “Sorry . . .” He paused. “What’s your name?”

  The idea of telling him my name and where I lived and what made me leave my body, the idea of explaining about my parents, made my stomach go cold. Again, no organs. Why could I still feel emotions forming in those parts of me I’d left behind?

  “I forgot,” he said. “No questions about the past.” He smiled. “So if this isn’t your field, why do you come here?”

  To find you, stupid, I thought. Before I landed in the field, I’d been racing toward something I couldn’t name—a boy I couldn’t name. If he hadn’t felt the same force I had, throwing us at each other, maybe that wasn’t real.

  I felt deflated, but I told him the truth. “I was rushing toward something—you, I guess. I only stopped here because that’s where I found myself when I passed you going the other way.”

  He thought for a moment. “I thought I saw my shadow on the ground. That never happened before. Like the shadow of a bird on the ground before it lands, only the shadow wasn’t bigger than me and it wasn’t getting smaller when I got closer.” He looked uncertain. “I guess that was you.”

  A chill fluttered up what would’ve been my neck.

  “You’re the only other ghost I’ve seen,” he told me.

  “I’m not a ghost.” Odd that he hadn’t seen one single other person out of body. “Where do you usually hang around?”

  “Sand dunes and caves. The ocean. The mountains.”

  He didn’t travel populated areas—maybe he was a beginner. “How long have you been out of body?”

  “I don’t count sunsets,” he said. “I chase them sometimes. Think I could ever make time go backwards?”

  He was so immature. “No.”

  “But if I flew so fast toward the sunset that I passed it, wouldn’t it be up in the sky again? Would I be hours back?” He studied my face and throat. “Let’s say I flew three hours backwards. Why can’t I fly ten times faster and get to yesterday?”

  “Go ahead.” I smirked at him. “I’ll wait here.”

  He grinned and flew away so quickly that I could hardly make out the blur of his black shirt, like a faint storm cloud against the sky. Then nothing, as if he’d never been there at all.

  The wind still shifted the grass and there was the distant cry of a crow somewhere, the tick of a beetle, but otherwise silence.

  I did not miss him. How could I? Our two conversations still totaled less than ten minutes. It was ridiculous. But the idea of leaving our field depressed me. I couldn’t imagine a single inspiring place to visit.

  Irritating as he was, I wanted him to come back, but there were no stars out yet for making wishes. It was almost sunset, though. How many hours had passed?

  Like a sneak attack, he rushed at me from the side and threw his arms around me, sending me into the grass. He rolled away laughing. The tingle of his touch vibrated up and down and all through me, cold and warm at the same time.

  “Did it work?” He sat up. “Do you remember me or is it yesterday?”

  I acted without thinking. I sped away, wanting to get back at him. I went to a cliff I’d been to many times. It was twilight there already, and the forest below was dim—only the mountain across the valley still glowed pink from the sunset. It made me smile, thinking of him standing there in the field alone. The same way he’d left me.

  But as the light crept away, I started to realize that I might never see him again. How could I find him? Even if I raced around the globe at light speed, the chance of crossing paths with him again might be microscopic. And it wasn’t as if I could go back to my body and look him up in the phone book. I didn’t know his name or what part of the world he lived in. The only thing connecting us was that stretch of grass.

  When I came back to the field, the sky was turning a deep shade of purplish blue. I walked around pretending that his absence didn’t hurt. The way the grass refused to part for me, no matter how I kicked as I passed through, made me mad. I walked in smaller and smaller wheels, and if I’d been solid I bet I would’ve made a spiral crop circle—finally I lay down on my back as the stars came out. I don’t think I could’ve been lonelier if I’d been on Jupiter.

  “Hey.”

  My joy was offset by the look on his face. Zero recognition. He knelt, leaning over me and smiling.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jenny

  HE DIDN’T REMEMBER ME! I sat up, speechless. And he sat back, laughing.

  “Just kidding,” he said. “I was going to pick you some flowers, but it didn’t work.”

  “How did you know I’d still be here?”

  “Hmmm.” He looked me up and down.

  “Do you think you’re that irresistible?”

  “Hey,” he said. “I tried to pick you flowers and now you’re making fun of me.”

  The field was dark. I shouldn’t have been able to see anything. But there were his eyelashes catching the starlight and the white of his teeth as he smiled and a strand of his hair moving in the breeze. We were seeing each other with our minds, I supposed, instead of eyes. “Really, how did you know I’d be here?”

  “You didn’t say goodbye,” he said with a shrug. “And you seem like a nice person, like someone who would at least leave a note if you were never coming back.”

  I tried not to look disappointed, but having a boy think you’re nice usually means he thinks of you as a sister. I didn’t have to be that sisterly girl. He didn’t know anything about the old me. It was like I always hoped college would be someday—a new beginning. A place you can create yourself from scratch and start over.

  “Okay.” I still didn’t trust him. There must be some catch. He was talking to me—most boys didn’t. And he was cute. “I could’ve left without saying goodbye,” I told him.

  “Yeah?”

  “I left my old life without saying goodbye,” I said, but then I felt bad because he looked sort of haunted.

  “So did I,” he said.

  Maybe he had someone who would miss him. I bet his family would notice if an empty body was walking around like a robot all of a sudden.

  “You didn’t have to come back just to say goodbye to me,” he said. “You’re free to do whatever you want.”

  “I know.” I tried to fake indifference. “It’s not like we’re friends. We just met.” But I was trying too hard—he could tell I was glad he’d come back.

  “You’re my only spirit friend,” he said. “There’s no one else to talk to.” Then he held up a hand. “That sounded bad. I meant, even if there was a hundred spirits standing around here, I’d want to talk to you.”

  Again, how could I blush? “‘My only spirit friend’? Are you a third-grader?”

  “We said we weren’t gonna talk about our pasts, including what grade I’m in or if I’m flunking out. That was then. Now I’m a superhero. I can fly, and dematerialize, and I’m working on turning back time.”

  It was funny that he thought being out of body made him powerful, because most of the time it made me feel powerless. I couldn’t move a blade of grass or be heard by anyone no matter how loud I yelled in their ears; I couldn’t even make a shadow in the blazing sun. I felt just as trapped in this out-of-body world as I had in the old one. But he was right—we could fly. That had always been at the top of my wish list when I was little.

  “Where did you fly to when you left me?” I asked.
/>   “I went to this coral reef I like and jogged around awhile, and then when you left me I went to this park near where I used to live, but I couldn’t steal any of the roses.”

  He didn’t wait in the field when I flew away from him. I felt a little hurt, but I also admired his self-confidence. And he’d thought of roses. “You jogged around a coral reef?” I asked. “On top of the coral?”

  “No, it’s under water.”

  At first I didn’t get it, but then I realized the weight of the water wouldn’t slow him down. He could run on the sea floor as easy as he could’ve run down the sidewalk when he was in his body. “I haven’t tried that,” I said.

  “Yet.”

  “Yet.” I smiled.

  “Under water is really cool. And running on the surface is fun too.” He demonstrated by jogging around me in a circle, dipping down into the earth so that only his head and shoulders showed, and then back up again. I guess I looked surprised because he said, “You could run through a mountain, if you want—it’s dark, but it’s not like it hurts or makes you tired.” He nodded at my clothes. “Won’t even get your dress dirty.”

  I was shocked to find I was wearing a party dress that I’d never owned or even seen before, as far as I knew—rose pink. And still I was barefoot. My mind had conjured up clothes without my permission. Was there something about him that made me want to look more girlish?

  He sat beside me. “Where did you go?”

  “A cliff,” I said. It sounded so boring.

  “When you jump from here to some other place, can you go anywhere, or do you have to have a place in mind?” he asked.

  “Sometimes I picture a kind of place, like I’d think of pine trees, and then I’d be in a forest,” I told him.

  “At first I thought I had to have been to a place before if I wanted to land there, but then I decided to try to go somewhere famous I’d never been, and zap, I was right there. It was freaky.”

  “Like where?” I felt a lift inside me, as if the crest of a wave were taking me up for a moment.

  “I went to the pitcher’s mound of Yankee Stadium.” He counted on his fingers so as not to miss any of the really good ones. “The top of Mount Everest. The Hollywood sign.”

  This started to feel like a dream. Not just the crazy things we were discussing, but the way he was looking at me. Guys at school never flirted with me.

  “Do you have to know what it looks like? I mean, you’ve seen pictures of the Hollywood sign,” I said. “Or can you just make up a spot? Let’s say one mile directly east of where I’m standing?”

  He shrugged. “Try it.” When I hesitated, he said, “I won’t ditch you. I promise.”

  So I decided to go and was suddenly sitting in the same position, but in a brushy patch of weeds beside a wire fence. I looked west, but there must’ve been a slight rise in the land between me and our field—I couldn’t see him in the distance. I zapped back to where I’d been.

  “I think it worked,” I told him. “But it’s not like I walked back and measured the distance.”

  He got up on his knees. “Okay, I’m going to visit the spot on the exact opposite of the globe from right here.”

  He didn’t worry that I would ditch him, apparently. He disappeared in a blink and was back five seconds later. “You’re right. Hard to prove I did that correctly,” he said. “It was—”

  “No, don’t tell me what it looked like.” I smiled. “We’ll both decide to go to the spot exactly on the other side of the earth and see if we end up in the same place.”

  He grinned. “One, two, three.”

  Strangely, we sat facing each other on the moving back of the oceans. There was no land in sight and only starlight glimmering off the constantly appearing and vanishing edges of waves.

  I felt a laugh building in my middle. He pointed at me and we zipped back to the field. This zapping back and forth in space would’ve seemed like a dream, but I’d never had a dream this interesting.

  “What if you want to go somewhere that’s not familiar to me, like the playground of the school where you went to kindergarten, or your grandma’s back porch?” I asked. “You could find it but I’d be lost, right?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not like you’d really be lost,” he said. “You could just decide to come back to this field.”

  “Okay.” It couldn’t actually be dangerous. We couldn’t be hurt. And he was right—all I’d have to do was fly to a place I was familiar with. “Pick somewhere only you know.”

  He thought for a second. “How about the park where I learned to ride a two-wheeler?”

  “Sure.”

  “Wait.” He looked anxious for a moment. “I don’t want to be able to take you somewhere you don’t want to go.”

  “If I don’t like it, I’ll zip right out of there,” I told him.

  He thought about that for a few seconds. “I guess.” He shrugged. “Okay. But you go first. You take me somewhere.”

  “The first beach I ever went to,” I said aloud.

  In a flash I was standing knee-deep in waves at Archer Beach—the water couldn’t wet my dress or pull on my legs, but I was there. Only, I was alone. I could see a lonely parking lot light on the hill nearby, a log in the sand that looked a bit like a crocodile in the moonlight. I paused, to make sure he wasn’t going to pop out of the water and surprise me.

  When I came back to the field he was right beside me and said, “Guess that doesn’t work.”

  “Maybe I have to really take you.” I reached over and took his hand. The heat made something curl inside me.

  This time I thought of a place he would not know or think of as significant. I didn’t even say it out loud. I just thought of the department store window where as a little girl I’d stared at a ballet scene from Giselle displayed in marionettes. After that day, I wanted to be a ballerina.

  Even though we weren’t reflected in the glass, we stood on the sidewalk inches from the windowpane, and I still held his hand.

  “Shit,” he whispered, looking around—he gripped my hand tight. “That’s freaky.” Then he corrected himself. “Freakier.”

  We tested several theories. For one of us to take the other to an unfamiliar place, we had to be touching. We found by trial and error that if we chose a famous place but did not get specific, and did not hold hands, we’d sometimes end up far away from each other: one below the letters of the Hollywood sign and the other on top, or on two different sides of Niagara Falls. To stay together we had to touch. When we were arm in arm or hand in hand, either of us could say or think a place and we’d fly there, as fast as a thought.

  Standing face-to-face, holding each other by both hands, we took turns naming places, faster and faster. As soon as I realized we were standing between the paws of the Sphinx in Egypt, I would say, “The Lincoln Memorial,” and we’d be in Washington, D.C., standing on the stone steps with a giant looking down on us. We never felt the heat of the volcano in Hawaii or smelled the beasts in the darkened lion cage at the Bronx Zoo, but the colors and the light—and the strange sounds—it was amazing.

  Even so, even with the beauty of the view from Mount Rushmore and the stars above us in the Yosemite Valley and the foggy view from the Golden Gate Bridge, I stopped staring at the scenery.

  It was fascinating how his face was a constant—the lighting changed the shadows and lit his features in different colors, but his gaze on me was unshakable.

  “The Great Wall of China,” I said, and around us a gray ribbon of stone materialized like the arching back of a dragon. I could see the tiny reflection of it in his eye. I looked closer to see if I could find myself reflected there, but I could never get quite close enough.

  “Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas,” he said, and an enormous fountain appeared in a golden glowing hotel lobby.

  “Beautiful.” I asked, “If you hadn’t said ‘Las Vegas,’ would we be in Rome right now?”

  He laughed. A small dog came by in the arms of an elderly woman—w
hen it kept its gaze on him and began to growl, he growled back and the pitiful thing ducked into the armpit of its owner.

  “That was weird,” he said. “Are you sure I’m not a ghost?”

  “The stage of Ford’s Theatre,” I whispered. Everything went black and the only way I knew we were in a darkened theater was that an amber safety bulb backstage illuminated the bars of lights and loops of ropes forty feet above us. His face was in the dark, but his hair was lit from above. Or did I just imagine that?

  “The Sea of Tranquility,” he whispered. We were in a chalk gray landscape with an ink black sky. His face half-lit made me wish I had a camera. Would he show up on film? Then I noticed the earth hanging in the sky in crisp blue, black, and white. The idea of being on the moon frightened me. I closed my eyes and he laughed at me.

  We were not solid, but we could touch each other, see each other, and definitely we could feel each other. When he took my face in his hands and gave my head a playful shake, I felt as if I were spinning around until I fell down, just like I had when I was a little girl. He was smiling. In return I gave him a gentle push on the shoulder, and from my fingertips, up my arms, all through me, I buzzed with the pleasure—like swinging on a playground swing, that weightless joy at the far end of each sweep. That was how I felt, as if I was always moving toward him and away from him and back to him again.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  “The Eiffel Tower,” I whispered. Iron lace towered upward.

  “The crazy cars at Fun Zone,” he said.

  I took one look at the spinning faces, laughing tourists circling us in a blur, then closed my eyes again, holding on to him for balance. His arms folded me into his energy, our combined spirits making their own electric charge.

  The speed of our game was getting to me. Maybe he sensed this, because he asked, “Should we slow things down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hollywood Wax Museum,” he said.

  The museum was closed—it was almost pitch-black, but there was just enough light from an exit sign to make out a row of figures looming over us, one directly beside us. A faint glint in the unblinking eyes was eerie enough, but I could also make out the unhealthy camel color of the wax cheeks and the frozen smile of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. She stood right at my left shoulder. We were standing with the Lion and the Tin Man and the Scarecrow—there was a painting of the Emerald City behind their heads. That storybook setting should have made them seem friendly, but I felt small and terrified. It wasn’t the texture of Dorothy’s cheek or the disturbingly permanent wave of her hair that made me feel sick. It was imagining sitting in front of a mirror and looking into her eyes and maybe in my closet door seeing the back of her head.